Learning
Author: Christian Seitz, San Diego, CA
The first time I heard about the new coronavirus, it was an intriguing novelty, but nothing more than that. It was in China, I told myself, and it would never affect me, full stop. Still, I read the daily updates with avarice. Each day it got worse; this was unfortunate, I thought with a subconscious air of condescension. Fast forward a few months, and I’m collecting my items from my office the day before being sent home indefinitely. It was such a strange feeling – something like the last day of college before summer break, but without the finality or closure you get from saying goodbye, as everyone had already left. The new coronavirus was no longer just something unfortunate, it was something here, happening to me.
The next few weeks were a steady and steep downward spiral. I met up with a few of my best friends while we still could, but I wasn’t really there with them. I was somewhere far away, in some blurry land with no future, no past and a void for a present. There were only two times I came back to reality – playing soccer forcefully yanked me back into the present, on this earth, into my own body, and for an hour I felt real again. Sure I may have walked back to my car to head home, but I never really made it home. Like someone in Star Trek getting lost in the teleporter, I got lost on the way and slipped back into some alternate consciousness.
Why did I feel this way? Every single night I laid bolt-awake in bed, angry. I didn’t know anybody who had gotten sick, much less died. What was happening to me? I was still dizzy, and screaming inside. Every time I left my apartment, the ever present heavy mortal squall was waiting to envelop me. Like a broken record, I kept remembering the tragic story of the Johnstown flood; the poor townspeople had no idea that the dam above their town would break and drown them. I vividly felt a similar spectre hanging over my own reality: a sick ghost hanging over us all, but seen by none. I was living in such a dry nameless fear.
As I read the daily reports and the deaths piled up, this spectre grew heavier and heavier like the humidity over a Florida summer day, but I didn’t know how to escape it. Each night as I lay in bed, scrolling through Twitter and vainly hoping it would bore me to sleep, I saw a steady stream of scientists excitedly posting about the new coronavirus. This was a whole new realm for them to explore, and they were making discoveries at a breakneck pace. They were not nurses or medical doctors, but they were using their skills to try to help this terrible situation. As a computational scientist working on infectious respiratory diseases, I am actually amongst the small cohort of people who can work to try to find a cure or vaccine. Soberingly, I never considered helping. As the tweets and texts from peers streamed in, I felt more and more sick about the whole situation. I gain meaning in life from helping others, I even became a scientist explicitly for this purpose. But just as you can’t tangibly grab the coronavirus and stab it to death, I was incapacitated from tangibly helping.
One night I finally stumbled on an answer, an uncomfortable and ugly one at that. Even though there was a real push from science to help all these people suffering, I could also feel a subliminal stroke of the ego. Yes most scientists may have wanted to do research on the coronavirus out of a humanistic desire to save humanity, but there was a clear undercurrent of self-promotion of the deaths of so many people. To me, this undercurrent was a tsunami, choking my throat. The rush to publish, to brag about results, to complete media appearances…it made me sick to my stomach. I wished I could separate that grisly underbelly of arrogance from the real valorous impact I could make to help others and give them hope, but I could not. Normally I am quite capable of wantonly pushing aside my own desires to accomplish a needed goal, but not here.
Next comes the cliched part about how I refocused, found an inner strength to fight coronavirus and find inner peace while accomplishing the American dream, because this is America, and we are shiny happy people who demand neat and tidy endings. Perchance that will come, but right now that is as far away from my reality as the imagination can stretch. Starkly, I don’t know how this story ends. I don’t know when I’ll leave this blurry existence and rejoin the living present. I don’t know when people will stop dying. I just want it to end. Without even touching a single person I know, this evil spectre of coronavirus is destroying my life, my sanity, my faith in science and…and everything. Some of us die in the grave and some of us die standing on our own two feet. Me? I just want it to end.